Tag Archives: Jean-Luc Godard

It’s October 2017 and we’re interviewing Stacy Martin, the French-English actor currently best known for her breakthrough role in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. We’re here to discuss her part in Redoubtable, the latest film from The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius, but there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s not just that we look shaken up from an attempted mugging on our way to the interview (Martin very kindly poured us a drink upon discovering this).

Only a few days before our conversation, Anne Wiazemsky, the woman Martin plays in the biopic, passed away, aged 70. An actor and novelist, she made her cinema debut at age 18, playing the lead in Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar. Wiazemsky didn’t make a huge number of films, but she collaborated with many of that period’s key European directors, including Pier Paolo Pasolini (on Theorem and Pigsty), and, crucially, Jean-Luc Godard, to whom she was married from 1967 until their official divorce in 1979, though their relationship had broken down as early as 1970.

Redoubtable is adapted from one of her many novels, Un An Après, which chronicles her time shooting Godard’s La Chinoise in the late 60s. As well as presenting a portrait of their romance’s rise and fall, the film documents a version of Godard’s personal and political conflicts across the surrounding period, including his ultimately successful efforts to have the Cannes Film Festival cancelled – Cannes-celled? – in light of the May 1968 civil unrest in France…